The Undead in My Bed

by Katie MacAlister; Molly Harper; Jessica Sims

  “You seem to forget who owns this house,” Gray answered. “This is my priest’s hole, and anything in it—not that there is anything—is mine.”

  “Take one more step toward it, and I’ll shoot,” Miles warned, turning the gun on him.

  He really is such a drama queen, Noelle told Gray. I hate to admit it, but he’s absolutely perfect for Teresa’s show.

  “That would be unwise in the extreme,” Gray said, and stepped into the darkened hole.

  Noelle knew the second before Miles pulled the trigger that he was going to shoot Gray, and despite the fact that she knew the shot would not kill him, despite all of her training, despite everything she’d ever learned while working with members of the Otherworld, a primitive part of her brain had her rushing forward to stop the attack.

  “No!” she screamed, and flung herself on Miles, her eyes widening in shock when a burning pain seared through her side.

  Gray roared her name as the world seemed to spin around her, her legs suddenly feeling as if they were made of tofu.

  He shot me, she told Gray, even as she was whisked off her feet. He really shot me. Oh! You have your soul back! How nice. I think I’m going to faint. Do you mind?

  Not at all, he answered, and, happy despite the burning sensation that seemed to sweep over her entire body, she smiled as she gave in to the swoon.

  Chapter Eight

  Are you sure you’re all right now?”

  “Absolutely. It was just the shock of actually being shot. But I’m fine now. You can untie Miles. He doesn’t look very comfortable with that rope tied around his feet and neck. His face is bright red.”

  “He’ll survive,” Gray said, his face filled with grim satisfaction when he glanced at the man who lay bound at her feet. He rose and helped Noelle from her chair.

  “If this little comedy is concluded?” Amaymon asked politely, but it was politeness edged with razor sharpness. “Bring me the jeton.”

  Gray met her gaze and then, with a little shrug, reentered the priest’s hole, emerging a few seconds later covered in cobwebs but empty-handed.

  “It’s not there.” He turned to Amaymon. “What does the jeton look like?”

  Amaymon’s jaw worked for a few seconds before he answered. “It is a small disc, about the size of a human fingernail, made of gold, and stamped on either side with my symbol of power.”

  Noelle drew in a deep breath. The collar tag! He’s talking about Johannes’s collar tag.

  I remember now. Shortly before he died, Johannes gloated that he had a token of immense promise, one that would have beings everywhere bowing down to him because of who it represented. He led me to believe it was a statue, though. That sly old— Gray bit back an obscenity.

  “What will you give us for this jeton?” Noelle asked, ignoring Gray’s soft noise of irritation. “Will you exchange it for the removal of the vitiation on Gray?”

  To her complete surprise, the demon lord waved a dismissive hand. “I care little for the squabble between a father and a son. The vitiation was useful only in finding the location of Johannes, since he was bound to you, Dark One. Give me the jeton, and I will remove the curse.”

  He never really wanted you. Noelle gave a little laugh. It was your father he was after all along.

  He could have told me that! Gray snapped before saying aloud, “We accept. It will take me some little time to locate Johannes.”

  “I do not have any more time to waste on this. I have spent four hundred years waiting for my minions to recover the jeton. Bring it to me now, or I will simply take it and leave the vitiation as it is.”

  Miles grunted and made a few choking noises.

  I think you’re going to have to do something about him. Noelle nodded toward the bound man.

  What would you like? I could sit on him, if he’s annoying you.

  How about cutting the rope that’s choking him?

  Why would I want to do that?

  Because, my darling, he is the one responsible for your soul being returned. If he hadn’t shot you, I wouldn’t have reacted as I did, and that sacrifice is what completed the Joining and gave you back your soul. So, really, we owe him quite a bit.

  Gray, with a tsk of irritation, flipped open a pocket knife and slit the hog-tie rope.

  “Now, look here.” Noelle addressed Amaymon, prepared to argue as long as it took to get him to see reason, which, upon reflection, might be decades, if not centuries, but luckily, at that moment, Nosty strolled into the door with a big orange cat in his arms.

  “Found him! He was trying to get through the wards that someone drew on the front gate—mother of God! Demon lord!”

  Nosty turned white, dropped Johannes, and, with a quick apologetic look at Gray, vanished into nothing.

  “You almost killed me!” Miles gasped after he had enough air in his lungs to speak again. He rolled over onto his back and glared at Gray. “You murdering bastard!”

  “Johannes!”

  Amaymon bellowed the name with such force that Noelle stumbled backward a few steps. Gray quickly wrapped an arm around her, holding her tight, as Johannes, his back arched and his mouth open in a silent hiss of fury, looked wildly around the room for an escape.

  “Return to me the jeton which you stole!” Amaymon demanded, closing in on the cat. He raised his hand, power snapping and crackling around it.

  Do something. Noelle prodded Gray.

  What? Hold Johannes steady so Amaymon can smite him?

  He’s your father! You can’t let him be destroyed right in front of us.

  Why not? He destroyed my mother’s life, not to mention mine. He deserves everything that is coming to him.

  I agree, but let fate punish him, not Amaymon.

  Gray sighed even as he strode forward, snatching up Johannes and whisking the leather collar over the cat’s head. You’re not going to let me have any fun, are you?

  On the contrary, you’re going to have so much fun you’ll—

  Get down on my knees every morning and thank the gods that you found me? he finished, laughing in her head.

  Every morning and every night.

  I accept your terms. “I take it that you didn’t give this to Johannes to show he was high in your favor, as he claimed at the time?” Gray asked as he tossed the collar with its attached gold tag to the demon lord.

  Amaymon looked with satisfaction at the disc, ripping it from the collar. “I did not. He has never held my favor, let alone earned this token. He stole it from one of my wrath demons.” He flung the collar to the ground, glaring at the cat for a few seconds before turning toward the door.

  “Hold on just one second,” Noelle said quickly, coming forward to stand next to Gray, who was glaring down at the spitting, hissing ball of fur and claws in his hands. If the demon lord thought he could just walk out without fulfilling his part of the deal, he could just think again. “The vitiation?”

  Amaymon paused, rolled his eyes, but turned back to draw an intricate symbol in the air that glowed black, then silver, before dissolving into nothing. “It is removed. Keep your father away from me, lest I regret my generosity in allowing you all to live.”

  “Generosity.” Noelle snorted as Amaymon left the hall. “Without help from his minions, he doesn’t have that sort of power in the mortal world.”

  “I’ll get you both. See if I don’t!” Miles snarled, spittle flying from his mouth as he scrabbled around helplessly on the floor. “You’ll never work in television again!”

  “Well, that’s disappointing,” Noelle said, patting the still-hissing Johannes on his head. “Still, the day hasn’t been a total loss. I’ve had the experience of being shot and fainting, which I’ve never done before, and Gray has his soul back, thanks to you, Miles, and of course, the vitiation is gone, so we won’t have to move every couple of weeks and can live here instead. Nosty will be thrilled with the company. I’ll have to find someone to take over my portal in England, but I think that can be arranged. And now, I
believe that a celebration is in order.”

  Gray smiled at her, his lovely eyes shining with so much love it took her breath away. “I couldn’t agree more. Let me first lock this monster up in the priest’s hole, and we can retire to my room, where I will celebrate you until your eyes roll back in your head and you can’t do any more than lift a wan hand in praise of my manly prowess.”

  Noelle giggled. “I have a better idea of where we can leave Johannes so he won’t get into any trouble.”

  “I swear by all that is holy that I will have my vengeance—you’re leaving? You can’t just leave me here like this! I demand that you untie me!”

  As they strolled out the front door, Teresa ran up to Noelle. “Oh, there you are. I was just coming to get you. The fire trucks are at the gate, but we don’t have the key to open the lock.”

  “The fire turned out to be nothing but Miles trying to get everyone out of the house so he could search the priest’s hole for nonexistent treasure,” Noelle told her as Gray dug into his pocket and handed Teresa a set of keys.

  “Really?” Teresa frowned. “That’s an underhanded thing to do. Although . . . I wonder if we could get a few shots of the halls filled with smoke. That would be very atmospheric. Where is Miles, speaking of him?”

  “Inside,” Gray answered, and reached into his pocket again, extracting his pocket knife and handing it to Raleigh.

  “Er . . .” the cameraman said, gingerly taking it.

  “It’s a long story. Right now, we have to rehome Gray’s cat. See you later,” Noelle told them, taking Gray’s hand.

  “If you’re going where I think you’re going—” Gray started to say.

  “It’s the perfect answer, really, don’t you think? Who better to watch over your father than your mother? Plus, she’s lonely, Gray. Not that she’ll continue to be now that we are going to move in, but still, having Johannes there will give her a reason to live. So to speak. And just think of what a fine sense of justice this is going to give her! He’ll be dependent on her for everything.”

  Johannes howled, an unearthly, tormented howl that wasn’t in the least bit feline.

  Noelle watched with pleasure some ten minutes later, as Gray, for the first time since the vitiation had been bound upon him during that fateful night several hundred years before, was able to see his mother. She swallowed back a painful lump of tears as the two of them stared at each other for a few seconds, before Joan opened her arms and Gray clasped her to his chest.

  “It really is the most touching scene,” Noelle told Johannes, who continued to yowl and attempt to escape but was powerless to do so wrapped up in Gray’s jacket. “You’re very lucky. We both are, really. You get to be with your son and the woman who gave up her life for you, and I finally get to be a Beloved to someone who honestly wants me in his life.”

  I don’t just want you, my love, I need you. You brought me more than just my soul—you brought me my mother’s forgiveness, and salvation, and most of all, you gave me happiness in the form of a feisty, red-haired little nun.

  Noelle smiled as Gray turned, his arm around the semitranslucent form of his mother. “Yes, indeed, we are lucky,” she said softly, rubbing her chin on Johannes’s head as she gazed with love at the man who gave her everything she wanted. “Now, about that visit to the vet—”

  The birds, which had now returned to the trees around the derelict cottage after several hundred years, squawked in protest at the feline screech that filled the air.

  Undead Sublet

  Molly Harper

  Beware of Jesting Vegetables

  1

  In retrospect, I should have known something was wrong when the arugula started telling knock-knock jokes.

  Leafy greens rarely had a sense of humor. And yet there I was, standing in the bustling kitchen of my busy Chicago restaurant, watching the vegetables on the prep table perform their own vaudeville act.

  When confronted by the comedic stylings of salad ingredients, most people would have maybe called it a night, taken a sick day. A normal person would have done exactly that. I was willing to admit that now, exiled from my kitchen and the city that I loved to the wilds of western Kentucky.

  My only excuse was sheer exhaustion. The restaurant, Coda, had been overbooked since it opened four years before, far beyond even the wildest expectations of the owners. Six months in, the executive chef quit in a very loud, very public snit over farm-grown oysters, which I still didn’t understand, so I’d been promoted to the head position on the fly. Changes I’d made to the menu caught the attention of some reviewers, which brought even more people through the door. The owners offered me a 5 percent share of the business because I’d been working eighteen-hour days for nearly three years and hadn’t yet called the labor board. Even when I did manage to get a night off, some crisis would call me back into the kitchen, and before I knew it, I’d worked twenty-one days without a break.

  I started making stupid mistakes, confusing sea bass with turbot and mistiming pasta. It was all fixable, but in my head, the mistakes compounded and made me a nervous, double-checking wreck. And yet I still kept up the schedule, only coming home to collapse for a few hours before rising again to scour the supplier markets for ingredients. Chefs who slept in missed the freshest produce and the choicest cuts of meat.

  I ignored the signs that I was overworked every time I looked in the mirror. My hair was dark and thick but hung in a limp cloud around my face. It had no luster, no life. My skin was pale, pasty, and drawn. While I had a passably pert nose, my lips were far too wide and my blue eyes too large for my face, which was emphasized as my cheekbones became more prominent and the dark undereye circles spread.

  I lost weight that I couldn’t really afford to lose. I was short and small-boned but what one briefly employed busboy charmingly referred to as “stacked like hell.” As if I needed another reason for men not to take me seriously in the kitchen, the distraction of an above-average rack meant I had to work that much harder, which led to more hours, which led to my interactions with giggling vegetables.

  On top of the sleep deprivation, my vacation to London had been canceled because the restaurant’s business manager, Phillip, booked a high-profile vintner’s dinner for that week, deciding that I “wouldn’t mind” putting off my trip for another year. That same manager, who also happened to be my ex-boyfriend, had asked me for “space” three months earlier and then had gotten engaged to the woman who cleaned his teeth. Who also happened to be his ex-girlfriend, something I didn’t find out until after their engagement. No wonder he spent all that time flossing. And because I worked such insane hours, the chances of meeting a new man I was attracted to and didn’t work with—trust me, I’d learned my lesson there—were practically nil. My rent was going up again, just as I was getting close to saving enough for a down payment on a townhouse. So if I wanted to buy my own home anytime soon, I was going to have to work more hours.

  More. Hours.

  I was contemplating how to bend the space-time continuum to make this possible, when the arugula shouted, “Knock knock!” When I answered, “Who’s there?” that seemed to upset my coworkers. Joining the veggies in a full-on George Burns soft-shoe ensured Tess Maitland’s place in the chronicles of “chefs who publicly flipped their shit.”

  The room tilted under my feet like a ship’s deck, leaving me seasick and dizzy. I heard the disembodied voice of my mentor, Chef John Gamling, telling me that my hollandaise was gelatinous swill not fit to dress a McMuffin, which was weird, because I hadn’t made hollandaise sauce that night. I tried to argue that I had people to do that for me, but then I collapsed on the floor in a heap.

  And that’s when the paramedics showed up.

  Phillip, the ex-slash-manager, “strongly encouraged” me to take some time off. I said, fine, I would take the weekend. And then he made a noise in his throat that made it clear that two days was not what he had in mind. And then he used the word “sabbatical,” which was international culi
nary code for “lost her fricking mind.”

  We cooks liked to pretend that our exiled brethren were touring northern Italy or southern France, collecting recipes and refining pastry techniques. But “on sabbatical” usually meant they were drying out in a facility called Promises or Sunrises or some such thing.

  I responded by inviting Phillip to commit indecent acts upon himself with a lemon zester. Phillip suspended me without pay for six weeks, which was, I felt, an overreaction. By the time a dishwasher drove me home, the urge to sing and dance with garnishes had worn off. I sat in my living room, staring at the blank beige walls, and I got pissed.

  “Coda” meant a satisfying conclusion—the slow build of a good meal brought to a delicious climax. Phillip had come up with the name. He could be a pretentious prick, but he knew about branding. Where was my coda? I loved my work. That kitchen was my life. But was I supposed to work myself into delirious zombiehood and then collapse dead on my stove?

  The fact was, I needed a break. I needed to rest, to sleep, to have conversations with people that did not involve butter-fat ratios. I needed to get as far from Coda as possible so I wouldn’t get sucked back into the kitchen and into that compulsive vortex of crazy. I made some arrangements online, packed a few essentials, and drove to Half-Moon Hollow, Kentucky, the only place I thought I’d get a welcome. Also, I may or may not have driven to Phillip’s apartment and thrown a honey ricotta cheesecake at his front door.

  Chef Gamling and his life partner, George, had retired to Kentucky a year before to be near George’s family. Chef, my mentor in culinary school, was the only family I’d had in a long time. Never one to tolerate martyrs or kitchen drama, Chef had assigned himself the task of “whipping me back into shape.”

  Knowing Chef as I did, it was possible he would use a wire whisk.

  So there I stood, on a dirt driveway in the middle of nowhere, outside the two-bedroom farmhouse I’d rented from late September to late October. It looked as if someone had been building a sturdy little farmhouse and at the last minute decided that Victorian gingerbread and frills were an absolute necessity. The house was halfway to restored, with recently painted lemon yellow siding and bleached white trim. But there were no flowers in the yard, no silly wind chimes laced through the gingerbread eaves, and I found that sort of sad. There were carefully mulched beds surrounding the house, but no one had bothered to plant anything in them. The house seemed ancient but somehow half-finished, a pall of failure hanging over it like real estate B.O.